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Some thoughts on the Seven Virtues

A while ago, over dinner with my partner Eve, her mom, and some friends of theirs, we started talking about the Seven Deadly Sins.

I am not terribly good at them; in fact, it took a while to remember what they were (greed, envy, sloth, lust, gluttony, pride, and wrath). Of the seven, the only one at which I have any skill is lust; in fact, I’ve put so many character points into lust I’m still forced to make default rolls for all six others.

I got to thinking about the Seven Deadly Sins, and wondering if there were Seven Virtues to go along with them. Apparently, there are; a few hundred years after the list of vices caught hold, someone decided there should be a similar list of virtues, and made such a list by negating the vices. The virtue Chastity was proposed as the opposite of Lust, for example, and the virtue Humility as the opposite of Pride. (Some of the others don’t really make a lot of sense; proposing Kindness as Envy’s opposite ignores the fact that people can simultaneously feel envious and behave kindly. But no matter.)

The negative version of the Seven Deadly Sins didn’t really seem to catch on, so Catholic doctrine has embraced a different set of virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and charity.

I look at that list, and find it a bit…underwhelming. We’ve given Christianity two thousand years to come up with a cardinal list of virtues in human thought and deed, and that’s the best it can do? It’s almost as disappointing as the list of Ten Commandments, which forbids working on Saturday and being disrespectful to your parents but not, say, slavery or rape, as I talked about here.

Now, don’t get me wrong, some of the things on the list of virtues I heartily endorse. Courage, that’s a good one. Justice is another good one, though as often as not people have an unfortunate tendency to perpetrate the most horrifying atrocities in its name. (Handy hint for the confused: “justice” and “vengeance” aren’t the same thing, and in fact aren’t on speaking terms with one another.) Temperance in opposing injustice is not a virtue, hope is that thing at the bottom of Pandora’s jar of evils, and faith…well, the Catholic catechism says that faith means “we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us,” and furthermore that we believe all “that Holy Church proposes for our belief.” In this sense, to quote Mark Twain, faith is believing what you know ain’t so. (On the subject of hope, though, it should be mentioned that Hesiod’s epic poem about Pandora says of women, “From her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmates in hateful poverty, but only in wealth.” So it is without an exuberance of cynicism that I might suggest there is perhaps a synchronicity between the ancient Greek and modern Catholic thinkings on the subject of the fairer sex.)

In any event, it seems that, once again, the traditional institutions charged with the prescription of human morality have proven insufficient to the task. In my musings on the Ten Commandments, I proposed a set of ten commandments that might, all things considered, prove a better moral guideline than the ten we already have, and it is with the same spirit I’d like to propose a revised set of Seven Cardinal Virtues.

Courage. I quite like this one. In fact, to quote Maya Angelou, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.” So this one stays; in fact, I think it moves to the head of the list.

Prudence is a bit of an odd duck. Most simply, it means something like “foresight,” or perhaps “right thinking.” The Catholic Education Site defines prudence as the intellectual virtue which rightly directs particular human acts, through rectitude of the appetite, toward a good end. But that seems a bit tail-recursive to me; a virtue is that which directs you to do good, and doing good means having these virtues…yes, yes, that’s fine and all, but what is good? You can’t define a thing in terms of a quality a person has and then define that quality in terms of that thing!

So perhaps it might be better to speak of Beneficence, which is the principle of making choices that, first, do no harm to others, and, second, seek to prevent harm to others. The principle of harm reduction seems a better foundation for an ethical framework than the principle of “right action” without any context for the “right” bit. (I’m aware that a great deal of theology attempts to provide context for the virtue of prudence, but I remain unconvinced; I would find, for example, it is more prudent to deny belonging to a religion than to be hanged for it, simply on the logic that it is difficult for dead Utopians to build Utopia…)

Justice is another virtue I like, though in implementation it can be a bit tricky. Justice, when it’s reduced to the notion of an eye for an eye, becomes mere retribution. If it is to be a virtue, it must be the sort of justice that seeks the elevation of all humankind, rather than a list of rules about which forms of retaliation are endorsed against whom; formal systems of justice, being invented and maintained by corruptible humans, all too easily become corrupt. A system which does not protect the weakest and most vulnerable people is not a just system.

Temperance needs to go. Moderation in the pursuit of virtue is no virtue, and passion in the pursuit of things which improve the lot of people everywhere is no vice. And this virtue too easily becomes a blanket prohibition; the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who were anything but temperate in their zeal to eradicate alcohol, failed to acknowledge that drinking is not necessarily, of and by itself, intemperate; and their intemperance helped create organized crime in the US, a scourge we have still been unable to eradicate.

In its place, I would propose Compassion, and particularly, the variety of compassion that allows us to see the struggles of others, and to treat others with kindness wherever and whenever possible, to the greatest extent we are able. It is a virtue arising from the difficult realization that other people are actually real, and so deserve to be treated the way we would have them treat us.

Faith and Hope seem, to be frank, like poor virtues to me, at least as they are defined by Catholicism. (There is a broader definition of “faith,” used by mainline Protestant denominations, that has less to do with accepting the inerrancy of the Church in receiving divine revelation and more to do with an assurance that, even in the face of the unknown, it’s possible to believe that one will be okay; this kind of faith, I can get behind.) Indeed, an excess of faith of the dogmatic variety leads to all sorts of nasty problems, as folks who have faith their god wants them to bomb a busy subway might illustrate. And hope (in the Catholic sense of “desiring the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit”) can lead to inaction in the face of real-world obstacles–if we believe that once we get past the grave, nothing can go wrong, we might be disinclined to pursue happiness or oppose injustice in the here and now.

I would suggest that better virtues might be Integrity and Empathy. Integrity as a virtue means acting in accordance with one’s own stated moral precepts; but there’s more to it than that. As a virtue, integrity also means acknowledging when others are right; being intellectually rigorous, and mindful of the traps of confirmation bias and anti-intellectualism; and being clear about what we know and what we hope. (When, for example, we state something we want to be true but don’t know is true as a fact, we are not behaving with integrity.)

Empathy in this context means, first and foremost, not treating other people as things. It is related to compassion, in that it recognizes the essential humanity of others. As a moral principle, it means acknowledging the agency and rights of others, as we would have them acknowledge our agency and our rights.

Charity is, I think, a consequence arising from the applications of justice, compassion, and empathy, rather than a foundational virtue itself. In its place, I propose Sovereignty, the assumption that the autonomy and self-determinism of others is worthy of respect, and must not be infringed insofar as is possible without compromising one’s own self.

So bottom line, that gives us the following list of Seven Virtues: Courage, Beneficence, Justice, Compassion, Integrity, Empathy, and Sovereignty. I like this draft better than the one put forth by Catholicism. But coming up with a consistent, coherent framework of moral behavior is hard! What say you, O Interwebs?

“Empathy” normally refers to the ability to be understanding of other people’s feelings, behaviors, circumstances, etc. From an emotional, neurological, and even sometimes intellectual standpoint, some people have extreme difficulty with that, either in general or in specific areas that are never likely to be even remotely within their personal experience – and it’s not something that they’re really capable of learning. If you ignore that aspect of it, and go for some abstraction where pretending to understand something which you really can’t is a virtue, then I’m not sure why it would be necessary as a separate thing – a combination of “Sovereignty” and “Compassion” seem to cover it well enough.

“Empathy” normally refers to the ability to be understanding of other people’s feelings, behaviors, circumstances, etc. From an emotional, neurological, and even sometimes intellectual standpoint, some people have extreme difficulty with that, either in general or in specific areas that are never likely to be even remotely within their personal experience – and it’s not something that they’re really capable of learning. If you ignore that aspect of it, and go for some abstraction where pretending to understand something which you really can’t is a virtue, then I’m not sure why it would be necessary as a separate thing – a combination of “Sovereignty” and “Compassion” seem to cover it well enough.